Midnight thoughts, perhaps a little rambling...

Here's a thought: why do we photograph ? To show the world, in whatever light or sheen we see it at that particular moment ? Or rather to record our own lives, whether for our own consumption and that of our social networks for that tiny fraction of photographs that is actually cicrulated, or perhaps because recording something gives an illusion of control ? Not that I would necessarily claim the superiority of one over the other between showing and recording. After all, showing can imply a touch of vanity that may result in vacuous pictures - and many great works of photography were associated with a mission to record systematically (think of August Sander, Dorothea Lange, Bernd and Hilla Becher and many others). And the same goes, rather more modestly, for the countless portraits I take of members of my family - though in this particular case the limited circulation has more to do with another unshakeable rule, namely that people more often than not don't like themselves in a picture. Why ? Perhaps the topic of subsequent midnight musings...